Has Covid-19 been a “reallocation recession”?

Abstract

To answer the question in the title: Thus far, not dramatically so. In this Chicago Fed Letter, I document three facts supporting this conclusion. First, although the Covid period has seen multiple months with high rates of worker movement (reallocation) across industry sectors (relative to previous recessions), net cumulative reallocation from the onset of the pandemic through December 2020 is only the third highest among post-1945 recessions over the same horizon (and is only modestly outside the confidence bound for the average across those recessions). Thus, much of the reallocation during Covid seems to have been a reversion toward the pre-crisis allocation following the highly dispersed initial impact of the virus.